


Magpie's Wings

by Minutia_R



Category: Kentucky Avenue - Tom Waits (Song)
Genre: Don't Have to Know Canon, M/M, Urban Fantasy, Wikipedia is a Girl's Best Friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 21:17:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1793485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim wants to be a sorcerer.  His best friend Bobby wants to fly.  The problem: Bobby's legs have been stunted by polio, and magic isn't real.</p><p>Or is it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magpie's Wings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



> Hey, Deepdarkwaters, thank you for the excellent song and prompt! I hope you like what I've done with them.

Kentucky Avenue baked in the heat. Even Mrs. Storm’s prize lawn was yellow and wilted, the mosquitos were too drowsy to bite, and in the attic of the old Anderson place, the Stygian sorcerer Thoth-Amon stood gloating over his captive enemy.

“Do you think your knights and your footsoldiers are coming to rescue you, King of Aquilonia?” Thoth-Amon sneered. “No one will hear your screams here!”

Conan threw back his head with the pride of a caged tiger, and strained against the chains that held him fast. “No man has ever heard Conan scream! And I put my faith not in my knights and footsoldiers, but in my steel and my own mighty thews! . . . Hey, what are thews, anyway?”

“Dunno. Like arrows, maybe?” I said impatiently. I hated breaking character. I wanted to be the dark sorcerer from the mysterious south who had delved into mysteries that man was not meant to know, not a stupid kid with boysenberry juice smeared on my face. “Come on!”

“Die, sorcerer!” Conan bellowed. With a mighty strain, he burst free of the chains and promptly fell flat on his face on the floor with a clatter. “Shit. Son of a _bitch_ , Jim, can’t you even tie knots right?”

Conan--Bobby--dragged himself up to his elbows and just stayed there for a minute, breathing hard. There were tears glittering in his eyes, pain and anger and humiliation; I looked away quick before he knew I’d seen them. If I apologized he’d be even madder, and Bobby mad at me was the worst thing I knew. So I didn’t say anything, just kneeled down beside him to see what’d gone wrong.

The kite string we were using for iron chains had broken along the places where I’d weakened it with my pocket knife, just like when we’d practiced it before. But this time some of the string had gotten tangled in Bobby’s leg braces and he was stuck to the railing I’d tied him to. I unwound the string carefully while Bobby picked himself up, and I was left kneeling at his feet while the sun caught the dust motes in the light from the broken window, wondering what Thoth-Amon would say.

“Bobby--” I started, but just then he grabbed my shoulder.

“Shh!”

From below, I could hear a girl’s high-pitched giggle and a boy’s voice, only a bit lower, cracking when he tried for a husky whisper. Seemed like Bobby and I weren’t the only ones who’d picked the old Anderson place to play in. I crept down the attic stairs quiet as I could, peered out into the living room, and scampered back up to report.

“It’s Hilda,” I whispered against his ear, “and Ronnie Arnold.”

There was a gleam in Bobby’s eyes that I didn’t like, when I said that. “Come on,” I said, “we can go out the gable window and onto the roof, and get down the oak tree without them knowing we were here.” Easier to say than to do, without Bobby’s leg braces making a noise at the wrong time and giving us away. But I’d rather’ve taken my chances with that than with whatever Bobby was thinking of.

Bobby--he couldn’t let things slide. There was no shame in being knocked down by Ronnie Arnold and having your lunch money taken; it happened to everyone. Ronnie was greedy as a hog and mean as a snake, and all us younger kids were scared of him. But it was only Bobby who nursed the fire of revenge in his heart, and only Bobby who would have dared to do anything about it. Bobby and me, because there I was, and no way in hell was I going out that window by myself.

“Hand me that basket of boysenberries,” Bobby hissed, “and get back down there. Take off your shoes! Don’t make a _sound_ until they’re really . . . occupied. Then holler.”

I could’ve argued, but I didn’t. The basket had a double-handful of berries left at the bottom, the ones that’d been too mushy to eat, plus all the juice that’d leaked from the rest of them. It dripped dark purple when I passed it over, and Bobby grinned. I took off my shoes, tied the shoelaces together and hung them around my neck, and walked wide around the broken glass from the window. I soft-footed it down the stairs, inching closer than I’d dared to before. Hilda and Ronnie were sitting on the old beat-up sofa, and she was almost in his lap, her giggles muffled now against his mouth. He started undoing the buttons on her blouse. I could see a triangle of bright white bra. I shifted uncomfortably in my crouch by the stairs. Should I call Bobby now? But I waited.

Hilda put her arm around Ronnie’s waist and her hand in his pants. I could see him stiffen and twitch from all the way across the room. _Then_ I hollered. Hilda squealed. Ronnie pushed her off his lap and rose up off the couch with a roar. And Bobby came whizzing down the bannister, holding on with his left hand, the basket of boysenberries in his right.

Maybe Bobby had two gimp legs, but he had a dead eye. The basket hit Ronnie in the center of his forehead. He yelped and staggered backwards, sticky purple juice coating his face and hair, mushy berries flying everywhere. A couple of them fell into Hilda’s bra, and she spat a string of cusses at us. I pulled Bobby to his feet and started hauling him toward the door, but he paused long enough for Ronnie to wipe the juice out of his eyes so he could see Bobby flipping him the bird. Then he let me drag him away.

We ran out of that house, whooping with laughter. I had to kind of hold Bobby up, ‘cause he couldn’t go fast and balance so well at the same time. I knew any second Ronnie was going to catch up with us and kick our asses. Somehow he didn’t, though. For one golden afternoon, all the long way down the hill and back to Bobby’s back yard, it was like our feet had wings.

#

“This is dumb,” Bobby said. “It’s not gonna work.”

I set my teeth. “It is absolutely going to work. I saw it on The Twilight Zone.”

I knew Bobby was right. Sometime in the last couple of years, I had lost the knack of belief. Desperately wanting and having what you wanted be true were no longer the same thing, and if there was any magic, it was long ago and far away, not in Merced County, California, in 1964.

So what was I doing at midnight on the shortest night of the year, in a cornfield--where I’d had to carry Bobby piggyback, because no way could he sneak out of his house in his wheelchair--with two dead rattlesnakes and the remains of a magpie that Bobby’d found by the side of the highway?

I used to think that Bobby mad at me was the worst thing. I was wrong. This past year, if he’d cussed me out and called me an idiot, if he’d smashed all my Esteban Jordan records with a hammer, I’d’ve been over the moon. Instead it was going over his house for a piano lesson with his mom and not even being able to see him, ‘cause he was resting. It was eating lunch at school at a table by myself, bringing Bobby the work that he’d missed and working on his model tanks and planes for maybe ten minutes before he had a headache and had to turn out the lights. Even once he came back to school, his eyes were dull and his voice was flat and he wasn’t interested in anything; the silence at lunch was worse with him there than with him gone.

So if he was willing to go along with this--even if he thought it was dumb, and even if I knew it was dumb--then yeah, we were going to do some magic. I wanted my best friend back--Conan the Cimmerian, who laughed in the face of danger and put his faith in nothing but his steel and his own mighty thews.

Thews meant muscles. Bobby had looked it up, then thrown the dictionary across the room. That was before he had the surgery that was supposed to keep both his legs the same length, and everything went wrong.

“This is the magic ring,” I fished it out of my pocket `and handed it to Bobby. “It shows you visions of the future.”

Bobby shined his flashlight on it. A skull and crossbones glinted back at him, and he snorted. “Yeah, it does.” 

“Not now. When the spell starts working,” I said, annoyed. Maybe it hadn’t been the best choice, but it was what I could get at the junk shop for a dollar, and I thought it looked cool. “We see your future, right, and then we change your future. That’s how it works. Have you got the spokes?”

Bobby slipped the ring onto his thumb, set down the flashlight, and reached into his coat. “Here.” He was starting to sound interested despite himself. “I worked them loose from my wheels two days ago. My parents haven’t noticed.”

“Good.” I knelt on the ground opposite Bobby and moved the flashlight back to make a nice lit-up work area. I got the magpie carefully out of my backpack, shedding feathers as I tried to straighten the wings and attach them to the spokes with loops of wire.

“Give it here,” said Bobby. “Butterfingers.”

He never let me do anything but the easiest bits of his models, either. I didn’t mind. I liked watching him work. His mother may’ve given up on turning him into the concert pianist she’d never gotten to be--he hadn’t inherited her love of music, but he’d inherited her fingers, long, nimble, and quick.

“There.” Bobby wired the wings to his ankles, and I laid the rattlesnakes across his shoulders. “Now’s when you say the spell, right?”

“Not yet. You get the ring out and look into it. I got to make a connection between the sorcerer--that’s me--and the subject of the spell--that’s you.” I got one last thing out of my backpack--a sharp nail from my dad’s workshop. I hadn’t talked about this part with Bobby. But it felt right. I shrugged out of my coat and rolled up my left sleeve, and wrote his initials on my arm: _RDK, Robert Douglas Krauss._ It stung. I bit my lip and kept going. There wasn’t any blood, but the letters showed up stark and red in the light of the flashlight.

I could have sworn I heard wings fluttering and an ominous dry rattle. I looked up. The snakes on Bobby’s shoulders and the bird at his feet were stirring, faintly but unmistakably. Bobby’s face was lit up from below as he stared into the ring.

“Do you--do you see anything?” I whispered. It was working. I couldn’t believe it.

“I see me . . . and there you are . . . is that really how people are wearing their hair in the eighties? You look like a dickhead.”

I burst out laughing. “You moron!”

“Jim.” Bobby’s voice went suddenly low and urgent. “Say the spell. Say it _now_.”

“Um.” The words were blocked for a moment, then came pouring out of me, one-third Twilight Zone narration, one-third purple prose from old pulp magazines, one-third--I don’t even know what. “Travellers between birth and death, journeying in the misty regions--spirit of the snake, spirit of the bird, spirit of the long night, I summon you. Let what was written be erased, let what was broken be made whole, let Bobby fly.”

Swear to God, the wings flapped harder, and Bobby rose off the ground--one inch, six inches. Then he yelled out, dropped the ring, and fell. His breath came harsh and painful through his teeth, and he muttered, “It got--damn, all of a sudden it got hot--what is that?”

The snakes and the magpie had fallen silent. There was another sound, far-off and faint at first, then earsplitting. “Fire truck,” I shouted.

Bobby’s eyes were wide with fear. I didn’t understand why, but I started to feel it too. “Where’s it headed?” he said. “I gotta see.”

I scooted closer and let Bobby put his arms around my neck. The rest of the stuff didn’t matter--I picked him up and headed back to the road, following the flashing lights, the sound of the siren, and the smoke rising into the night sky. I was staggering and falling-down-tired by the time we caught up with the fire truck, stopped outside of Bobby’s house, or what was left of it. The attic had fallen in, and smoke was pouring out of Bobby’s bedroom window. The neighbors were leaning out the windows, or gathered in their pajamas on the sidewalk, watching. Bobby’s parents were out front. His mother was screaming, and his father was holding on to her, saying, “You can’t go back in there. The firemen will get him . . .”

We made our way through the crowd, unnoticed, and I let Bobby down from my back and he leaned hard on my shoulder instead, walking towards his parents with small, slow, painful steps. “Uh, mom?” he said. “I’m right here . . .”

She snatched him up with a sob, and I got out quick, before anyone could ask what I was doing there.

Back in school, after Christmas break was over, Bobby was a minor celebrity. The kids who’d been avoiding him the whole year--like a botched surgical procedure was contagious, maybe--all wanted to ask about the fire. But we still had our table to ourselves at lunch, so I could ask what I’d been wondering all week.

“If you’d been home--you would’ve died, wouldn’t you? Do you think the spell saved you? Or--did we make the fire happen, somehow?”

“Nah.” Bobby fingered the ring on a string around his neck, which was blackened and chipped like it had burned, and fallen a long way. “It was just a game. Magic’s not real.”

#

If I was smart I’d’ve done what Bobby did: forget the whole thing, write off whatever I could as coincidence and pretend the rest hadn’t happened. The fire at Bobby’s house should’ve convinced me, if anything could, that magic wasn’t safe to fool around with--but I knew it was there now. It was like a scab I couldn’t stop picking at.

I bought myself a set of Tarot cards, read all the books about astrology at the library, hung out at Miss Garcia’s botánica down by the railroad; anything I could get my hands on, I tried. Most of it was mumbo-jumbo, or rip-offs, or religion dressed up to look like something else, but some of it wasn’t. And the more I found, the easier it got to find the good stuff, the stuff I was looking for.

It was dangerous, and I was dumb. My spells had a way of bouncing back at me. Like the time I tried to find out how the UCLA-USC game would go and ended up with nothing but three broken ribs. Which was an answer to my question in a way--that was the year Jim Murray made that crack about filling the Heisman Trophy with asprin--but it wasn’t real helpful and I couldn’t breathe right for a month.

And there were Things out there. Bigger and nastier things than me, in the magical world same as in the schoolyard. Most people just flew under their radar, but once I’d started meddling--I drew the attention of a water baby out by Lake Tahoe in 1969, and spent the next six months in Camarillo State Mental Hospital. My musical friends thought I’d found a good way to avoid an all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam courtesy of the federal government, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t insanity, either, at least not the kind you can read about in the DSM.

Bobby, meanwhile, went to college. Caltech, studying aeronautical engineering. He wrote to me sometimes, and they tell me he came to see me in the nuthouse, but I don’t remember that. It must’ve been true, though I found it hard to believe. Bobby hated hospitals.

I put myself back together and got out of that place, and the letters stopped, ‘cause I had no fixed address to send them to. I drifted east, telling fortunes, finding lost objects, playing piano in little dive bars, making a life for myself in the cracks and chinks of the real world. Eventually I washed up in New Orleans--a great town for magic, where gris-gris doctors and Illuminati rubbed shoulders, and vampires swapped fashion tips with rugaroos and wendigoes.

In those days you could still hear Irma Thomas singing “It’s Rainin’” at the Medallion, and Zebra was just getting started. I soaked it all in, never good enough to make a career of music, but it filled in the gaps when magic wasn’t enough to pay the rent. I played hotel lobbies and nightclubs and fly-by-night cafes, and along the way I figured out why tying Bobby up used to get me more wired than watching Hilda and Ronnie ever could. Mrs. Storm, back home, would have said I was walking the dark road to damnation, and she’d probably have been right. Sorcery and sodomy, strong drink and the devil’s music. But the company was good, good enough to get me through the nights, at least.

#

You know what they say: Look around the table. If you don't see a sucker, get up, because you're the sucker. It’s just as true in the magical world as it is in poker, but do I ever get up? No, I do not.

And that’s how I found myself running up the stairs of a burning building, the sound of my feet echoing the rhythmic chanting of the cultists below and the fire licking at my heels hissing at me at an inhuman voice. But I figured the worst the fire would do was kill me, which was more than I could say for the cultists.

“Ssstay ssstill, little sssorcerer, and let me eat the flesh from your bonesss.” The fire popped and crackled like it was laughing, and I didn’t need to look behind me to see the lizard-like grin forming in the flames.

Getting eaten by a salamander: better or worse than having my immortal soul sacrificed to a nameless horror? I was running out of options. I’d used up my last prepared hex earlier that morning when a pooka had tried to tear out my throat with its teeth. I tried to speak a word of power, but all that came out was a hacking cough. I was also out of stairs. I made for the wrought-iron balcony, which gave a little under my weight, with the salamander gnawing at its supports.

I could survive a fall, maybe. I had an amulet in my breast pocket that an old kabbalist had given me, Psalm 34 wrapped in red string. It was supposed to be proof against broken bones. I doubted it was proof against whatever was lurking in the street below, with tentacles and glowing malevolent eyes.

Chanting cultists. Taunting flames. And another sound, far-off and faint at first, then earsplitting. I looked up, and swear to God, there was a helicopter dropping out of the sky. An old-fashioned one, like a crystal sphere with a long tail strut. With my luck, it was another enemy--maybe that vampire prince I’d had a brief fling with a couple years back; that hadn’t ended well--but when a rope ladder dropped down within reach of the collapsing balcony, I grabbed it and started to climb. The salamander swarmed up at my heels.

I pulled myself into the helicopter, breathing hard and seeing spots, and the first thing I noticed was that instead of a pilot’s seat it had a dock for a wheelchair. Bobby turned to me and said, “Hey, Jim.”

I made a very intelligent reply, something like, “Holy fucking shit balls.” Then the salamander leaped right over my shoulder and sunk its claws into the back of Bobby’s neck. He yelled, but his hands on the controls didn’t falter.

I found my breath and my words then. “Let your fire be quenched, let your heart grow cold, _freeze, motherfucker_.” I grabbed the damned thing--which hurt like hell--and pulled. It caught for a second on something, and Bobby’s eyes got wide and his yell was cut off with a choking sound, then the salamander came loose and I flung it out the door and slammed the door shut behind it, watching it flicker and go out as it fell.

“I guess . . . that was bound to happen.” Bobby sounded shaken, and no wonder. He was touching--not the back of his neck, which was torn up and burnt to hell, but his throat. I suddenly realized what it must have been that the salamander’s claws had caught on, and that I’d tossed out the door with it. That old skull and crossbones ring I’d given Bobby, the magic one, that always looked as if it had been burned and then fallen a long way.

It was too much. I couldn’t even think about what that might mean. “You got a first-aid kit in this thing?” I said.

“Under the passenger seat,” Bobby said.

He winced when I cleaned out his cuts. His hands were as steady as always. “So . . .” I said. “What’re you doing in the neighborhood? Just flying around picking up guys?” And what put my mouth on flirt-mode? As if I didn’t know.

Bobby just grinned. “Something like that. You’re looking a hell of a lot better than the last time I saw you, Jim.”

Which just goes to show how bad I must have looked in 1969. After a day of getting kicked in the face, savaged by wild beasts, and nearly burned to death, I sure wasn’t winning any Miss Universe contests.

“Likewise,” I said. It was true. Bobby wasn’t a skinny kid anymore, all sharp points. I’d never be able to carry him piggyback now. Hell, he could probably bench-press _me_ \--I wondered if his other wheelchair was one of those racing models.

I settled back in the passenger seat, tearing my eyes away from Bobby and looking out at the view instead. The sun was setting behind us, and twilight was touching the edges of Lake Borgne. I had about a million questions to ask him--like what had he been doing all this time, and where were we going--but I was also exhausted. One minute I was trying to figure out what to ask first, and the next minute Bobby was shaking me awake. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. We’re here.”

I blinked. My first crazy thought was that we’d been shrunk down to toy-soldier size, and we were looking at Bobby’s model planes, because they were all there, under the floodlights. “Is this . . . a museum?” I guessed.

“The Army Aviation Museum,” said Bobby. “I work here, restoring old planes--but the _Magpie_ ’s mine.”

“The _Magpie_ ,” I repeated. His, and rebuilt to his specs, right. “Bobby--how the hell did you know where to be, really, exactly when I needed you?”

“I always knew.” He reached for his throat, like it was an old gesture, but the ring was gone. “I saw it that night, you know, in the ring. The exact place and time. I never believed it a hundred percent, but . . . that haircut still makes you look like a dickhead.”

“You moron.” I leaned over and kissed him, just to shut him up. I wasn’t sure what he’d do, but he pulled me into his lap and kissed me back.

There’s a feeling you get, when a spell that you thought had gone wrong suddenly goes right. I don’t know how to describe it--it’s the best feeling in the world.

Second-best, anyway.


End file.
